In a sign that end of the world is with us, fruity tax-dodging cargo cult Apple is helping customers who are running older Macs to upgrade with a discounted SSD.

This is entirely the opposite of Apple’s normal policy of using every trick in the book to upgrade to the latest model, and Jobs Mob has just released a new MacBook Pro which normally it would want its users to buy.

Instead it is dropping the prices of SSD upgrades for its older Mac lineup. The price drop in prices are pretty substantial and go up to $200. Before the discounts 512GB SSD option which was set at around $300-400, while the 1TB option would cost customers $800-900.

Now they have been discounted where the 512GB upgrade will cost around $200-$300, while the 1TB option has been discounted to $600-$700.

To be fair it is a little on the late side to upgrade the old Apples – they are really old and really not worth spending extra money on, but it is nice that we are not seeing Apple’s normal tricks to force users to upgrade.

Still the reviews of the new Apple Macs are not that great, many are saying that the new Microsoft machine has all the innovation that the new Macs lack.

TSMC is thinking about dropping contract prices for its handset-IC clients to help ease the pressure of their declining ASPs and gross margins.

According to Digitimes, the move is likely to help out its handset-chip customers including MediaTek and other firms supplying chips mainly for Android devices.

The handset suppliers are under pressure to cut costs in what has been a particularly rigorous level of competition. Major handset-IC vendors including Qualcomm, MediaTek and Spreadtrum have all suffered gross margin decreases.

MediaTek told its most recent investors meeting that the company would see its gross margin fall further in the second quarter of 2016 despite higher shipments and revenues. MediaTek cut its gross margin outlook for the year of 2016 to 35-38 per cent.

Clearly if Digitimes is right, then TSMC is wanting to keep its business partners healthy until this rough patch is over. While it might lose a bit of cash in the short term, if its partners do well it will make more in the long run. Although to be fair, there are no indications that MediaTek or Qualcomm are going anywhere soon. In fact we predict that both with have good years on the back of some rather nice chip technology.

Chipzilla is giving Xiaomi a free processor to install in its tablets as part of its sales push.

According to Digitimes , Intel is bringing in the free chip deal to see off rivals like Qualcomm, MediaTek and China-based chip designers. While it will not make Intel any cash, it will boost the outfit’s market share.

In addition to giving preferential pricing to clients with large orders, Intel has also cooperated with Rockchip and invested in Spreadtrum.

Even free, Intel’s chip deal is a bit of coup. Chipzilla has been trying to get Xiaomi as a major client for a while. It adopted Intel's Atom X5-Z8500 in its Xiaomi Tablet 2 launched in late-November,

With Intel's discounts and Inventec's assistance, Xiaomi's notebooks have become competitive in both pricing and quality which will allow the China-based vendor to step on an equal footing against first-tier vendors such as Lenovo, Asustek Computer and Acer.

Unfortunately Xiaomi only has only offered limited shipments for its tablets but Intel is hoping that it will lead to the company adopting Intel chips in its 70 million annual smartphone shipments.

Since Xiaomi has also been aggressively expanding its smart home Internet of Things (IoT) supply chain, Intel's partnership with Xiaomi may help the CPU giant get a foot in the door there too.

Finance outfit Morgan Stanley has been testing AppliedMicro ARM processors for its data centres and come back with shedloads of real world experience.

Bert Shen, vice president of technology business development at the financial services firm told Computerworld AppliedMicro showed it a benchmark that compelled it to take a closer look at ARM.

"They ran a very relevant columnar database benchmark for us and got a 5x performance improvement per rack compared to an Intel Haswell EP solution. We thought this was about the right time to bring in a proof of concept.”

In a small test running a few ARM cartridges in an HP Moonshot chassis but it could be the beginning of something much bigger.

While ARM is traditionally touted for cost and heading reasons, Morgan Stanley is interested in performance and the fact it did not like relying on one supplier – in this case Intel.

AMD is technically a second supplier of x86 server processors, but it has not been worth considering for a while, he said.

Fabless chipmaker AMD has come up with a mixed set of results for the second quarter. The company managed to make as much cash as the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street expected, but missed revenue expectations.

In fact its revenues were below the psychologically important billion figure at $942 million.

We knew it was going to be bad. Last week we were warned that the results would be flat. The actual figure was $942m, an 8.5 per cent sequential decline and a 34.6 per cent drop from the same period a year ago.

As you might expect, there are some measures of this not being AMD's fault. The company is almost entirely dependent on PC sales. Not only have these fallen but don't look like they are going to pick up for a while.

AMD's Computing and Graphics division reported revenue of $379m, which was down 54.2 per cent, year-on-year. Its operating loss was $147m, compared to a $6m operating loss for last year's quarter.

Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO, in a statement said that strong sequential revenue growth in AMD's enterprise, embedded, and semi-custom segment and channel business was not enough to offset near-term problems in its PC processor business. This was due to lower than expected consumer demand that impacted sales to OEMs, she said.

"We continue to execute our long-term strategy while we navigate the current market environment. Our focus is on developing leadership computing and graphics products capable of driving profitable share growth across our target markets," she added.

In the semi-custom segment, AMD makes chips for video game consoles such as the Nintendo Wii U, Microsoft Xbox One, and Sony PlayStation 4 consoles. That segment did reasonably well, up 13 percent from the previous quarter but down 8 percent from a year ago.

But AMD's core business of processors and graphics chips fell 29 percent from the previous quarter and 54 percent from a year ago. AMD said it had decreased sales to manufacturers of laptop computers.

Figures like this strap a large target on AMD's back with a sign saying "take me over" but AMD is not predicting total doom yet.

For the third quarter, AMD expects revenue to increase 6 percent, plus or minus 3 percent, sequentially, which is a fairly conservative outlook given the fact that Windows 10 is expected to push a few sales its way.

AMD supplies chips to the Nintendo Wii U, Microsoft Xbox One, and Sony PlayStation 4 consoles and these seem to be going rather well.

With the US growing hemp again after banning as part of the war on drugs, US boffins are using medical marijuana to provide a rival for graphene as the next model material of supercapacitors.

David Mitlin said that one approach researchers are taking to boost supercapacitors' energy density is to design better electrodes. Mitlin's team has figured out how to make them from hemp fibres which hold as much energy as graphene.

The good thing is that the potty electrodes are made from biowaste using a simple process, and therefore, are much cheaper than graphene.

His process uses hemp bast fibres which come from the inner bark of the plant and often are discarded. Bast is a by-product of Canada's fast-growing industries which uses hemp for clothing, construction materials and other products.

The US could soon become another supplier of bast. Mitlin's team found that if they heated the fibres for 24 hours at a little over 350 degrees Fahrenheit, and then blasted the resulting material with more intense heat, it would exfoliate into carbon Nano sheets.

Fully assembled, the devices performed far better than commercial supercapacitors in both energy density and the range of temperatures over which they can work.

The hemp-based devices yielded energy densities as high as 12 Watt-hours per kilogram, two to three times higher than commercial counterparts. They also operate over an impressive temperature range, from freezing to more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

Of course there is the problem that you would have to feed your chip when it got hungry which would be most of the time. It might also tune into Teletubbies and Magic Roundabout for no apparent reason.

Haswell is Intel's highly anticipated next generation architecture, expected to launch in Q2 2013. VR Zone managed to get a hold of some processor models in numbers, shedding more light on the new chips.

Haswell will come in two and four core versions and TDPs ranging from 35W to 84W. The flagship is the Core i7 4770K and it was quite easy to guess that Haswell ends up with Core i 4000 name, since it is internally known as the fourth generation Core architecture.

The Core i7 4470K works at 3.5GHz and can turbo to 3.9GHz. It has 8MB of cache, four cores and eight threads. It officially supports maximum of DDR3 1600 and the K suffix suggests its an unlocked CPU. It comes with Intel HD 4600 graphics that run at 1250MHz and it is unclear whether there is a turbo clock for this new and well improved graphics core. The processor supports dual-channel memory controller and has an 84W TDP rating.

The current king of Intel's quad-core market, the Ivy Bridge based Core i7 3770K has a TDP of 77W, which is 7W lower than the new Haswell core. Bear in mind that Core i7 3770K has the same clock speeds as the Core i7 4770K Haswell, but as we heard before Haswell should come with much more powerful graphics compared to the previous 22nm generation.

The rest of the standard power lineup includes the Core i7 4770, with a 100MHz slowe clock and locked multiplier. It also carries the Core i5 4670K, a 3.4GHz to 3.8GHz clocked quad-core with four cores and four threads, 1200MHz clocked graphics and the same HD 4600 graphics core and 84W TDP.

Core i5 4670 is clocked the same as Core i5 4670K but it’s a locked version, while Core i5 4570 works at 3.2 to 3.6GHz and 1150MHz graphics. Core i5 4430 is the slowest of Haswell standard power cores and has a 3.0 to 3.2GHz clock, with 1100MHz graphics.

Intel also plans three S versions of the Haswell including Core i7 4770S with four cores and eight thread, Core i7 4670S, Core i5 4570S as well as 4430S, all quad cores with four treads, but their TDP will be under 65W. Intel doesn’t stop there, as it has four additional 35W to 45W desktop cores that will find its use in all-in-ones and small form factor PCs. The Core i7 5770T is 2.5 to 3.7GHz quad core with 4600 graphics at 1200MHz and still under 45W, which is rather impressive.

Core i7 4765T works between 2.0 and 3.0GHz and has 35W TDP despite its 4600 graphics with 1200 MHz clock. Core i5 4670T 2.3 to 3.3GHz quad core with four threads and four cores again at 45W and a single dual core called Core i5 4570Tclocked at 2.9GHz to 3.6 with 1150MHz graphics and all at 35W TDP.

MediaTek chairman Tsai Ming-kai expects an increase in demand for smartphone chips in the second half of this year, despite a slowing global economy.

Speaking at his company's annual meeting held in Hsinchu, Tsai said the global smartphone industry was expecting to enter a peak season from July onwards, driving sales growth for MediaTek.

In the first quarter of this year, chips used in mobile phones accounted for up to 55 percent of MediaTek's total sales, with China serving as a major buyer of the IC designer's products.

In 2011, faced with competition that was fiercer than ever before, MeditaTek posted US$454 million.

Tsai said the worst phase was almost over for MediaTek, and the company was gearing up to broaden its product portfolio and win orders to strengthen its profitability.

On the back of robust demand for smartphones, MediaTek has forecast smartphone-chip shipments in the second quarter to range between 18 million units and 20 million units, up sharply from the 10 million recorded in the first quarter.

For 2012, the IC designer anticipates smartphone-chip shipments to touch 75 million units due to rising demand from China and other emerging markets.

Chipzilla is claiming that not enough work is being done to adapt the Android operating system to work on dual core CPUs. Intel is currently having a crack at entering the market with its single-core Medfield Atom processors and running Android on multi-core chips might be a disadvantage.

Mike Bell, general manager of Intel’s mobile and communications group, said that in mobile power use was constrained and multi-core chews up a lot of juice. He told the Inquirer that if you did not have to worry about power, multiple cores would make a lot of sense. Namely, you can run the cores full out and heavily load them if the operating system has a good thread scheduler.

But when it comes to Android, things like thread scheduling and thread affinity are not there and when the operating system goes to do a single task, a lot of other stuff stops. Bell said that moving into multiple cores on Android means that Intel has to put a lot of investment into software to fix the scheduler and fix the threading so if we do multi-core products it actually takes advantage of it.

Its other problem is that more cores generate too much heat. At the moment with the multiple core implementations in the market, "it isn’t obvious to me you really get the advantage for the size and the cost of what’s going into that part", Bell said.

Chipzilla has not developed a multi-core Atom processor but it is tipped to come up with one if only for marketing reasons. In the meantime it has to work with Android to make sure that it can use it properly.

Chips made by the Green Goblin are powering a supercomputer that the graphics chip supplier claims has achieved the fastest speeds to date.

The Chinese "Tianhe-1A" has hit 2.507 petaflops, using 7168 Nvidia Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs. It beats another Chinese supercomputer also using Nvidia chips called Nebulae, which can manage 1.271 petaflops when the wind is behind it and it is going downhill. Nebulae is the second fastest in the world based on the Top500 June list.

Nvidia said that the "Tianhe-1A" will not only be the fastest but will also be greener. It only consumes only 4.04 megawatts, making it three times more power efficient than a CPU-only system.

Tesla chip marketing manager Sumit Gupta said applications of the "open science project" will include astrophysics, material science, and bio-chemistry. Nvidia is also working with laboratories and universities in the U.S.